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My favourite country to visit would be France, I like the food, I like the language, I like the people, I like the culture in general.
Many people claim the French are rude which is not my experience at all. Maybe because Danes are ruder? 😂
Au contraire, I've only been met with respect and professionalism when I've been to France.
France is amazing by the diversity of the landscapes you can find there. French people are alright if you get out of big cities, like Paris, Lyon or Marseille.
Source: am French
Hehe, I've been to Paris twice, and to Bordeaux, Montpellier, Hauts de France, and surrounding countryside as well. This year we'll drive to Alsace-Lorraine and visit the Vosges. I've liked every visit 🙂
I mean, some people are rude, that's normal. But overall we've been treated really well no matter where we've been.
I was in Bordeaux with my family for the world cup in 2018, it was a great experience even with thousands of people and us with two toddlers.
Sorry, this comes of as a love letter to France 😂 I promise, I also love visiting other parts of Europe!
That's a nice tour indeed! The Vosges are great for nature, I think it's the last rainforest in France.
Alsace has some of the most beautiful villages in the country, great wine and great food.
Lorraine is a bit plain but you have some pretty spots (pays de Bitche is cool) and loads of history (Verdun, Maginot Line).
A few underrated spots for me are Cantal and Ariège, the first one is a massive dormant stratovolcano and the second one is a pretty wild area (at least in the mountains). They're both great for nature and hikes.
Having just returned from a tour of Alsace, I'd describe the food as more "comical" than "great"
😂
I'm so sorry for you... This is what it's supposed to look like:
That looks awful :D Also vaguely obscene
Many people claim the French are rude which is not my experience at all.
99.9% of this is from US-americans who visit just Paris and speak very loud US-english to everyone. The Parisians are not as nice as the rest of France and no one appreciates an ignorant tourist speaking loud US-english into one's face as if it were a walmart in Texas or something.
In general the French are nice people.
I think it's a power-thing. Some Americans follow the 'customer is always right' thinking and expect staff to be servile. But my experience in Europe is that when you interact with a waiter or a shop assistant you're interacting with an equal who happens to be serving you at that moment, and who also expects a certain something from you.
I still remember a waiter who was very disappointed in me because I didn't know which wine I wanted to have with my fish 😂 Sorry, Danes don't know much about wine. Anyway, the only time I've encountered rude staff was in Belgium and only once or twice - and probably just because we seemed impatient.
My impression is that things have changed in the last 20 years or so. These days, people will not look at you like you're some disgusting bug if you speak to them in English. Haven't really been there a lot, though.
I found the Danes to be direct but nice.
French on the other hand can be nice on the front, and then stab you in the back. Also i have made the experience that many of them are increadibly racist and when they travel assume a colonial attitude. I'll never travel again with French people for that matter.
That's incredibly generalizing. You seem to have had the misfortune of traveling with some assholes, that doesn't mean all or even most of us have that kind of behaviour.
Well it was also "aided" by the experience of a friend, who is a french citizen, but living in Germany. When he visited a family member in France, some french teenagers harassed and spit on them, because there was an arab among their group. When he told the people of his group to properly make a scene, they told him not to bother as this is just normal in France. On the same voyage this friend was almost killed on the highway as a french driver tried to get him to steer off the asphalt by breaking in front of him and making moves of steering into him from the side repeatedly.
So within just a few weeks independantly and literally across the world, we experienced numerous occasions of french people being incredibly racist, showing an extreme sense of self entitlement and superiority, while not hesitating from deadly violence. Now at some farmers protest someone was killed and multiple people seriously injured too.
I do not want to claim that this is representative of every french person or person living in France. But it seems to be representative of an underlying and structural problem in franch society and culture. Therefore the positive experience that i replied to, should equally not be expected as a general sentiment in France.
Given that i am from Germany i also want to preemptivel warn everyone, that Germany as a whole is an incredibly racist country and racism has had a huge increase even more in the past few months. In this regard there seems to be many more similiarities between French and Germans than either people like to admit to. Unfortunately these similiarities are all not on the good side of behaviours and cultures.
Italy. Amazing culture, great food, very nice people.
Romania and France. Romania for the people and the castle's and France for the wine!
Greece Malaka! The original Europeans, the honorary middle easterners. Great food, beautiful nature, lovely people. Additionally, Athens is a fucked up but also very interesting place.
I’m hating on the influx of non-European tourists that are willing to pay the most ridiculous prices. This has made most of the islands impossibly expensive, where 5 years ago it was still very affordable if you avoided places like Mykonos and Santorin.
No one mentioning Germany :'(
Both my parents immigrated from Germany before meeting and marrying each other.
When I went back on my own in the late 80s, I got the most disconcerting feeling of being somewhere that was simultaneously intimately familiar while also being completely foreign.
Even just walking through the countryside gave me an indescribingly aching feeling in my chest, like I wanted to lie down in the tall grass and become one with the land and bind myself to it like some giant oak tree. Even the small villages with homes that often were a thousand-plus years old gave this impression of disturbingly compelling and eternal intimacy, and It absolutely freaked me out because I couldn’t understand it.
In all the places I have physically been, I have only ever felt something familiar in one other place: Vancouver Island in the Nanaimo region.
If you don't come to Germany, Germany will come to you!
I like visiting Germany :) Lots of good electronic music festivals and clubs! And board games!
Berlin is one of my favourite cities, it has a special vibe!
I've never vacationed in Germany, mainly because my wife does not speak German. I do want to go, though, I have a feeling that there's a lot of regional culture and food to discover if we just gave it a go.
Don’t worry too much about not speaking German. You will be fine speaking English 99% of the time.
Also beautiful places for biking and hiking, especially the forests are worth a visit.
I'd also like to take a look, about a year ago I started regularly speaking to some Germans and it's a lot more interesting to me for some reason now...
if you do don't concentrate on the southern regions with brezn and weisswurst. visit the north! eat fischbrötchen, krabbenbrötchen and braunkohl mit pinkel.
See that's why we're not coming to Germany, how are we supposed to take these dish names seriously.
Italy. The food but also the Italians are really hospitable.
Andorra, because: snow!
(also amazing food & people are super nice)
Russia because usually it's Russia that visits you. Then stays way too long, eats your food, sleeps in your bed, clogs your toilet and finally leaves with everything you own.
And with your toilet.
clogs your toilet
Wait… what??
Did they forget to bing their poop knife?
Слава Украини!
Sweden. Beautiful woods and lakes. We go for canoeing almost every summer.
Scandinavia is fantastic in summer. Don't go in winter, though.
I love visiting Portugal, been a few times to Lisbon, amazing city, and to the Algarve region. Visiting Porto is still on my todo list, I hear it's really nice too.
There are many places I’ve yet to visit, but Spain stands out to me specifically for the tapas.
Belgium is weird.
I am weird.
The answer is Belgium.
Denmark or Estonia. Both beautiful countries that constantly make me feel like "I wish we had this where I live".
Macedonia!
Switzerland! That's where my money is. /s